Dr. Knudson and the Two-Hit Theory

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  Fox Chase researcher Alfred G. Knudson Jr., MD, PhD, was recently inaugurated into the first class of the Fellows of the AACR Academy at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013, held in Washington, D.C. The inaugural group of fellows of the academy consists of 106 individuals, symbolizing the age of the organization upon establishment of the Academy. These fellows have been selected through a peer review process that evaluates individuals on the basis of their stellar scientific achievements in cancer research.

  Dr. Knudson has previously been awarded the Kyoto Prize and the Lasker Award, and is perhaps best known for his Two-Hit Theory of Cancer Causation, which provided a unifying model for understanding cancer that occurs in individuals who carry a “susceptibility gene” and cancers that develop because of randomly induced mutations in otherwise normal genes.